It has been a big year for labour history journals with both the North West History Journal and Saothar marking their fiftieth issues, and Scottish Labour History publishing its sixtieth edition.

This roundup looks at the latest journals published by:

• Scottish Labour History Society
• North West Labour History Society
• North East Labour History Society
• Irish Labour History Society
• Australian Society for the Study of Labour History
• Labor and Working Class History Association

Scotland

Introducing the 2025 issue of Scottish Labour History, Stewart Maclennan, chair of the Scottish Labour History Society notes that this year sees both the sixtieth edition of the journal and the SLHS’s sixtieth anniversary as an independent organisation, having previously functioned since 1961 as the Scottish Committee of the Society for the Study of Labour History. ‘Other than its parent body, then, SLHS is the most long-established national or regional body of its type in the British Isles’.

The issue includes:

Notices and reports on

• Equal Pay: Glasgow’s Women on Strike Project Launch at Govanhill International Festival and Carnival 2025, by Valerie Wright, Gerry Mooney and Jim Main
• Lavender Menace Archive, Brian Dempsey
• Calton Weavers Commemoration, by Keith Stoddart
• All Change at ‘Left on the Shelf’, by Dave Cope
• Research Note: Charles Diamond and the Glasgow Observer, by Thomas Davidson

The Ian MacDougall Memorial Lecture, 2025

• Women’s Lives in Clyde Shipbuilding Communities: “It’s ma job tae work and it’s yours tae make it go roon’”, by Dr Hugh Hagan
• Adaptability and Resilience: Women’s experience of shipbuilding decline in Glasgow and Belfast, 1970–2000, by Shonagh Leslie Joice

Profiles in Scottish labour history

• Clarice McNab Shaw, by Richard Leonard
• ‘Sons of Scotia’: Scots in the General Strike in Winnipeg, 1919, by Gerard Cairns
• The Spy Who Went Back to the Bricklaying, by Anni Donaldson

Articles

• Revisiting the 1945 General Election in Scotland, by Dr Malcolm Petrie
• A Flawed Rebel: Emanuel Shinwell, Maritime Trade Unionism and the Glasgow Harbour Riots of 1919, by David Isserman
• The Navvies Who Built Craigmaddie Reservoir, by Stephen Coyle

Plus a 2025 bilbiography, book reviews and obituaries.

Members of the Scottish Labour History Society will also receive with their journal a copy of a copy of Glasgow 1975, by Liam Turbett, an account of anti-fascist action in Scotland in the 1970s.

Further information: Scottish Labour History Society

North West of England

This year’s North West History Journal marks its fiftieth anniversary and fiftieth issue. As editor Paula Moorhouse notes in her editorial, although the North West Labour History Society itself was formed in 1973, it took a couple of years for the first printed bulletin to appear, and ‘from the outset the content was of high calibre’.

Articles in the 2025 issue include:

• ‘More than mere makers of tea’: the Labour Party Women’s Section in post war Eccles, by Eddie Little and Pat Bowker
• Moving to more-loom working in the Blackburn weaving industry: a case study, by Richard J. Holden with Richard W. Hall
• A rebel against all forms of injustice: the under appreciated and almost brilliant William Leonard Hall 1870-1916, by Dvid Hargreaves
• The General Strike 1926, by Ruth and Eddie Frow, with a short introduction by Paula Moorehouse
• Dvid Graham: a life of activism and inspiring others, by Dave McNally
• Was Chatterton a Massacre? Remembering the April 1826 Lancashire Rising, by David Gordon Scott and Kate Hurst
• Jailed for fighting for jobs: the long march of the Cammel Laird 37, by Pete Cresswell
• A good read? Book reviews
• Members are also able to access a free PDF of the first issue of the journal.

Further information: North West Labour History Society

North East England

Volume 56, 2025, of North East History, the journal of the North East Labour History Society  has articles which include:

• It was sixty years ago today…
• The 1761 Hexam Riot
• Pit Elegies and Ballads
• Coal Face: Exegesis
• The North East Heritage Library: and Interview with Kieran Carter
• Power to all people?
• Redhills Renewed: Durham Miners Hall brought back to life
• The Land of Oak and iron
• Maureen Calicott: The Story Continued
• From Our Archive: Labour Women in North East England
• The Closure of North East Shipbuilders: The Inside Story
• A Teesside Volunteer in the Lincoln Battalion

Further information: North East Labour History Society

Ireland

The 312-page edition of Saothar 50, the 2025 journal of the Irish Labour History Society, includes thirteen articles, two anniversary reflections, three ‘Labour Lives’, and two substantial essays in review; along with letters to the editors, obituaries, book reviews and a poem by patron of the Society, the President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins.

The front cover carries an image of a Irish Women Workers Union banner dating from the early 1920s, recently restored by conservator Rachel Phelan. The back cover includes a photograph of the late Dr Kieran Jack McGinley, a mainstay of the ILHS.

The ILHS website carries a full table of contents for Saothar 50 and an updated index for the years 2001-2025. Previous volumes are also indexed on the website.

Australia

The Australian Society for the Study of Labour History publishes the journal Labour History twice a year with Liverpool University Press.  Articles in the May 2025 issue include:

• ‘A Calculating Blow’: The 1937 Melbourne Stay-In Strike, by Phillip Deery
• Mobility and Labour in the Colonial Prison, India c. 1820–70s, by Nabhojeet Sen
• Lost Debates: The Australian Labor Party and World War I, 1918, Murray Perks
• Compensation Hid behind Asbestos Walls: Class, Protest, and Justice in the Dust Diseases Tribunal of New South Wales, by James Watson
• The Australian Railways Union and Rank and File Democracy in New South Wales, 1925–60, by Joseph Stark
• The 1913–14 Dryland Agriculture Strike in New South Wales, by Robert Tierney
• Resisting the Anti-Welfare State Backlash: The Australian Council of Social Service’s Social Welfare Advocacy, 1975–83, by Philip Mendes

Articles in the November 2025 issue include:

• The Archive, Digitisation and Labour’s History: An Introduction, by Diane Kirkby and Claire Lowrie
• Labour Activists’ Archival Assemblages and Resistability in Memory Work: Emma Goldman, Jean Désirée, and Rose Pesotta, by Maria Tamboukou
• Recovering the History of Chinese Amahs Travelling to Britain, 1840s–1930s, by Claire Lowrie
• Trouble on the Roads: Using Digital Techniques to Explore Convict Protest in Van Die-men’s Land, by Monika Schwarz, Michael Quinlan, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
• Becoming Visible: Aboriginal Domestic Servants in Digitised Photographic Archives from Queensland and New South Wales, by Srishti Guha

Further information: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History

United States

The Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) publishes its journal Labor: Studies in Working Class History four times a year through Duke University Press. The September 2025 issue features as its cover article Peter Cole’s ‘Scrap Iron Becomes Bullets: When Dockers Fought Fascism with Direct Action’ in which he explores dockworkers’ long history of solidarity activism in support of those fighting authoritarianism, fascism, imperialism, and racism.

Further information: Labor and Working Class History Association